Page 54 of The Dangerous Dance

He picks up from what sounds like the kitchen of the hotel on the Amalfi coast, which means dishes and Gianna's voice somewhere behind him and the particular warmth of a life that is genuinely other than mine.

"Liam," he says. His voice has the quality it gets when he hears from me now — not unwilling, just braced. The quality of someone who loves you and has also learned that loving you comes with specific weather.

"I need you to come back," I say. "Not for long. A few days."

A pause. "What happened."

I tell him about Maspeth. About Connolly. About the fight at the end of the week. I tell him what I need him there for and why — the specific reason I need him rather than anyone else — and I tell him he can say no.

He is quiet for a long moment.

"Am I doing the right thing," I say. "With Declan. With the fight."

Another pause. "You know I'm not objective about this."

"I know. Tell me anyway."

He is quiet in the specific way of someone choosing their words rather than organizing them. Finn has always been more deliberate than me in that way. "Declan needs to understand something that arguments don't produce," he says eventually. "He needs to understand it physically. In his body. The same way he understood everything when he was younger." A pause. "Our families aren't so different in that way."

"No."

"If you tell him about Connolly first," he says — and I'm slightly startled, because it's what Nadia said, the same instinct from two completely different angles — "he goes in with the right enemy in his head. He goes in fighting for himself rather than against you."

"That's what she said."

A pause. A different kind. "Who."

"Someone I've been—" I stop. Find the right shape. "Someone who's been helping me."

Finn is quiet for a moment that has several things in it that he's decided not to say. "All right," he says finally.

"Will you come."

"Yes," he says. "Obviously yes." A pause. "Gianna's not going to be happy."

"I know."

"She'll come anyway."

"I know that too."

A sound from the kitchen behind him — Gianna's voice, asking something. He says something to her that I can't make out, and there's a brief exchange, and then he comes back. "She says to tell you that you owe her three weeks of uninterrupted Amalfi after this."

I look at the ceiling. "Done."

"She's already started a list of what uninterrupted means."

"Of course she has."

He almost laughs. Then, quieter: "Liam. Are you all right."

I think about Ailish this morning and Nadia this afternoon and the Connolly file on my desk and three men down in Maspeth and the end of the week and what I'm going to say to my brother before I fight him.

"I'm getting there," I say.

"That's what you always say."

"It's always what's true."